Human-shaped ear grown in lab

BBC : Researchers have successfully grown an artificial human ear from cow and sheep tissues. To help maintain the ear’s shape and flexibility after being implanted in a live rat, they used a three-dimensional wire framework. “This research is a significant step forward in preparing the tissue-engineered ear for human clinical trials,” said Thomas Cervantes of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, one of the authors of a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. For human patients, they plan to harvest a small sample of each subject’s cartilage to use to grow the ear. The technique may be ready for human trials as soon as five years from now.